Best Practices in Data Center Re-Design will add $$$ to the Company's bottom-line - January 23, 2009
Orlando Florida -- Power consumption at data centers is once again in the spotlight, after Automation and Consolidation firm Sencilo Solutions of Daytona Beach Florida came up with a list of best practices in the data center that are designed to save electricity and improve cooling.
Sencilo claims that if companies follow all of it's best practices, they could typically expect to save 1 million kilowatt-hours. It says that in a conventional data center, between 35% and 50% of the electricity consumed is for cooling compared to only 15% in best-practice or 'green' data centers.
"Virtually all data centers waste enormous amounts of electricity using inefficient cooling designs and systems along with older storage arrays," said Rob Peterson, CTO and co-founder of Sencilo, in a statement. "Even in a small data center, this wasted electricity amounts to more than 1 million kilowatt-hours annually that could be saved with the implementation of some best practices."
The main reason for the waste in conventional data center cooling is the "unconstrained mixing of cold supply air with hot exhaust air on out dated servers and storage," he said.
"This mixing increases the load on the cooling system and energy used to provide that cooling, and reduces the efficiency of the cooling system by reducing the delta-T (the difference between the hot return temperatures and the cold supply temperature). A high delta-T is a principle in cooling," McGuckin said.
The following are Sencilo's 10 top tips for reducing power consumption:
Plug holes in the raised floor. Holes in the floor allow cold air to escape and mix with hot air. This single low-tech retrofit can save as much as 10% of energy used for data center cooling, says Peterson.
Installing blanking panels. Data centers are full of racks, and unused rack space needs to be covered with a blanking panel so that air flow can be properly managed -- for example, by preventing hot air leaving equipment in one section of the rack and then entering the cold air intake for other equipment elsewhere in the rack. Sencilo says that when these panels are used effectively, supply air temperatures can be lowered by as much as 22 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 5 degrees Celsius).
Look into new primary storage compression appliances and de-dupe devices for backup and reduce the number of disk drives 15x.
Improve under-floor airflow. This typically affects older data centers, where the space under the raised flooring is a lot more constrained than in newer builds. Many old data centers also use the underfloor spacing for running data and power cables, thereby restricting airflow. Clearing out of these spaces is advised.
Implement hot and cold aisles. This is one of the most obvious best practices. Sencilo says traditional data centers use a "classroom style" to position their racks, whereby all the intakes face in one direction. The problem with this setup is that hot air exhausted from one row mixes with cold air being drawn into the adjacent row, thereby increasing cold-air supply temperature in uneven ways. Newer rack-layout practices over the past 10 years instead organize rows into hot and cold aisles, which offer much better control of airflow.
Install sensors. Seems obvious, but how do you tell if you have a temperature problem in a certain area of your data center? Sencilo says a minimal investment in this technology could reap big insights into data center operations and can also provide a method for analyzing the results of improvements made to the cooling systems.
Implement cold or hot aisle containment. When a data center uses hot and cold aisles, dramatically improved separation of cold supply air and hot exhaust air through containment becomes a viable option. Sencilo reckons effective containment of the hot or cold aisles will provide, for most users, the single largest payback of any of these best practices.
Replace those older filer servers with a new NAS arrary, in one case we retired 72 Compaq file-servers with aging 32 GB SCSI drives, which a single NAS device sporting the newer S-ATA II disk. Between reduced floor space, electricity, cooling and noise our client paid for the new NAS in 3 months.
Exploit free cooling. It depends a lot on local climate, but in winter in Northern Florida, cold air is readily available outside the data center.
Designing new data centers using modular cooling. Traditional data centers have been cooled by the raised-floor perimeter air distribution. Mounting evidence strongly points to the use of modular cooling (in-row or in-rack) as a more energy-efficient cooling strategy.
Today Sencilo Solutions has put it's "Green Certified stamp" on over 35 companies throughout Central Florida including two Power Companies and four government agencies.
For more information please call (407) 265-6293 or visit us at: http://www.sencilo.com/consolidation-assess.php
About Us
Sencilo Solutions is a Florida-based integrator specializing in Cost Cutting storage, security and managed services solutions. Sencilo delivers a comprehensive portfolio of products from best-of-breed hardware and software from multiple manufacturers including VMware, Data Domain, EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, HDS, IBM, Commvault, Xiotech and HP. Its technical expertise is known throughout the storage and security industry. Clients include leading corporations, major financial institutions, top universities, government facilities, as well as small to medium size businesses. Sencilo's professional services include consulting, integration, project management, storage virtualization installation, maintenance and knowledge transfer.
Sencilo has offices throughout Florida including: Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Hialeah, St. Augustine, Gainesville, Ocala, Palm Coast, Clearwater, Kissimmee, Lakeland, Maitland and Cape Canaveral Green Simpana Offerings Projects: BC DR planning Replication De-Dup De-Dupe iSCSI SAN NAS VMware Security EMC NetApp HP IBM Quantum Compliance VTL Data Domain vs Gartner Magic Quadrant Quadrent LTO Backup Exc Pure Disk NetBackup Networker TSM Commvault BakBone D2D D2D2T compare cloud data deduplication thin provisioning DXi Global Compression DDX virtual tape library Data Reduction SEPATON FALCON compare Celerra CLARiiON Equallogic Dell NS20 NS40 CX4 CX3-20 CX3-40 CX3-80 FAS2050 FAS3050 Xiotech Nexsan Avamar DLD3 1500 D3 Storwiz storage compression data Ocarina Networks A-SIS compare Sepaton infopro BlueArc OnStor Microsoft Unified Storage data protection StorageX Brocade FAQ SSD Solid state disk SANmelody FalconStor tier zero Xiotech ISE nx4 ax4 greenBytes ZFS Sun Top 10 ROBOBak managed services hosting cloud grid Datacore Compellent compellant equallogic lefthand networks don't buy storage stop buying storage itguardian cherub networks Arkeia Network Backup appliance Data Recovery Backup Health IT Healthcare IT Digital Hospital Allscripts
